"A revealing, poignant, and hilarious memoir from the cultural icon, gay rights activist, and four-time Tony Award winner. Harvey Fierstein's stellar career has taken him from Broadway to Hollywood and back. He's received accolades and awards for acting-Hairspray, Fiddler, Mrs. Doubtfire, Independence Day-and writing: La Cage Aux Folle, Torch Song Trilogy (for which he also won a Tony for acting) and Kinky Boots. But while he is widely known as one...

"Open the door....Holly Sherwin has been a struggling playwright for years, but now, after receiving a grant to develop her play Witching Night, she may finally be close to her big break. All she needs is time and space to bring her vision to life. When she stumbles across Hill House on a weekend getaway upstate, she is immediately taken in by the mansion, nearly hidden outside a remote village. It's enormous, old, and ever-so eerie--the perfect place...

"A madcap tale of sadistic power-play by one of the 20th century's most beloved French gay writers. My Manservant and Me is a story about the trials and tribulations of having a live-in valet. Written from the uneasy perspective of an aging, incontinent author of extremely successful middlebrow plays, we learn about his manservant, a young film actor who is easily moved to both delicate gestures and terrible tantrums; who's been authorized to handle...

William Shakespeare, the most celebrated poet in the English language, left behind nearly a million words of text, but his biography has long been a thicket of supposition arranged around scant facts. With his trademark wit, Bill Bryson sorts through this colorful muddle to reveal the man himself. Bryson documents the efforts of earlier scholars, and, emulating the style of his travelogues, records episodes in his own research. He celebrates Shakespeare...

This concluding volume of the life of an exceptionally brilliant polymath chronicles Luce's progress from her days in Congress. Elected in 1943, she became the only female member of the House Military Affairs Committee, toured the Western Front and visited concentration camps within days of their liberation. Attracting nationwide attention, she lobbied for relaxed immigration policies for Asians and displaced European Jews, as well as equal rights...

Searching for a suitable young wife from a good family, the Duke of Baynton instead finds himself drawn to struggling playwright Sarah Pettijohn, an outspoken beauty who, constantly challenging his ducal authority, makes him an offer he cannot refuse if he agrees to back her play.

"Maria von Trapp. You know the name and the iconic songs, but do you know her real story? This dramatic novel, based on the woman glamorized in The Sound of Music, brings Maria to life as never before. In the 1950s, Oscar Hammerstein is asked to write the lyrics to a musical based on the life of a woman named Maria von Trapp. He's fascinated to learn about this Catholic novice who was living quietly as an Austrian nun until her abbey sent her away...

"In this poignant and deeply intimate memoir, Sarah Ruhl chronicles her experience with Bell's palsy after giving birth to twins. At night, I dreamed that I could smile. The smile felt effortless in my dreams, the way it did in my childhood. Happily married and in the flush of hard-earned professional success, with her first play opening on Broadway, Sarah Ruhl has just survived a high risk pregnancy and given birth to twins when she discovers the...

Presents the life and work of the English playwright William Shakespeare and provides information about the theater of sixteenth-century London.

"In a world where everyone is inventing a self, curating a feed and performing a fantasy of life, what does it mean to be a person? In his grandly entertaining debut memoir, playwright David Adjmi explores how human beings create themselves, and how artists make their lives into art."--